Producing the Romantic 'literary': Travel literature, plagiarism, and the Italian Shelley/Byron circle

This study considers the relationship between travel writing and the formulation of "literary" Romanticism as it emerges in the Shelley/Byron circle. Appropriation from these popular materials was endemic, and I work here to uncover the unique position of travel sources as an intertextual feature of Romantic writing. Located between documentary "fact" and unmistakable "fiction," exploration literature is a genre which complicates epistemological and aesthetic categories. I argue in the chapters which follow that "literary" Romanticism is, in part, a product of these complications. While travel writing collapses the boundaries between romance and history, the assimilation of travel materials into literary texts reflects the Romantics' investment in producing imaginative language that was capable of narrating the Real.; In the course of this study, I consider both the particular environment of appropriation and exchange that developed among the Italian Shelley/Byron circle and the more general cultural attitudes toward exploration materials and their intertextual reemployment. The first chapter offers a detailed picture of how just one travel journal---Edward Williams' "Sketches during a Short Stay in Hindustane"---was circulated amongst this group of writers. A scholarly edition of this manuscript journal (Bodleian MS Shelley adds.e.21) has been included as an appendix. Chapter two considers these patterns of appropriation on a larger scale, tracing Romantic attitudes toward plagiarism and examining both the public controversy over Byron's borrowings from travel sources and the representations of intertextuality in Edward Trelawny's Adventures of a Younger Son (1831). Chapter three considers the relationship between the "powers of assimilati[on]" that Percy Shelley outlines in the "Defence of Poetry" and his own borrowings from travel sources. Chapter four argues for the roman a clef as a genre involved with the production of literary status in the Romantic period, and I consider Mary Shelley's biographical travel writing and late novels as exemplary texts.